Afghanistan cricket team failed to impress in their recent debutant Test match where they suffered a defeat against the no.1 Test ranking team India by an innings and 262 runs at Bengaluru in just two days. Their head coach Phil Simmons has said that the team needs to learn huge things and to work very hard to achieve success in the longer format of cricket.

Simmons believes the newest Test cricket team has to work five times harder than they did for the debutant Test match.

The 55-year-old said, “The learning curve is huge. It’s a mountain to climb. But I do believe they want to succeed, they want to be good at it and they work very hard. We now know that we have to work five times as hard as we worked in the last four weeks. I believe that they will get there.”

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Afghanistan cricket team is currently in the good forms in limited-overs cricket, but they failed to impress in their first ever Test match.

Talking about the reasons of Afghanistan’s weak performances in their debutant Test match, Simmons claimed, “I will blame about 30 percent on the occasion and I’ll blame a lot more on the naivety of what test cricket is about. You can play as much Intercontinental Cup and four-day cricket as you want but when you get upstairs to the big league, especially against the number one team in the world, it shows. And … it showed in a big way.”

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Talking about how they can improve the cricket in the longer format in the quick period, the Caribbean has suggested more ‘A’ team matches against the big members’ ‘A’ teams.

Simmons spoke on that, “There has to be a lot more ‘A’ team cricket played against big countries’ ‘A’ teams… like England, India, Bangladesh, Australia like that. That’s the best way for us to close this gap on a quicker term.”